Because the Silverlight 2 RC that was released is aimed primarily at developers wishing to update their projects to the final version of Silverlight 2 due out sometime this year, we didn’t provide an update to Deep Zoom Composer because most everyone who views Deep Zoom content will still be on Silverlight 2 Beta 2.

Instead, we have provided you with the updated project templates that are compatible with Silverlight 2 RC:

Once you have downloaded the above ZIP file, extract its contents to your [Program Files]\Microsoft Corporation\Deep Zoom Composer\ folder. Your ZIP file contains an updated version of the DeepZoomProject folder, so your old files will be overwritten with your new ones.

Anyway, once you have overwritten your old files, if you run Deep Zoom Composer and preview your output via the Export view’s Silverlight tab, you should be able to see and interact with your Deep Zoom images.

Comment below if you are running into any issues or things just aren’t working.

Today, we have released a preview of Expression Blend 2 Service Pack 1 that allows you to create content for the release candidate of Silverlight 2. You can download the Service Pack from the following location:

This Service Pack provides you with all of the functionality you had with our earlier Expression Blend 2.5 June 2008 Preview. Besides allowing you to create new projects for WPF, Silverlight 1, and Silverlight 2 RC, we are also exposing new platform functionality like Font Embedding / Subsetting for Silverlight 2 projects. More on this new functionality in future blog posts.

One thing to note, which is different from how we handled releases in the past, is that Expression Blend 2 SP1 Preview will install on top of Expression Blend 2. This will not be a side-by-side installation. This service pack is also an evolution of Expression Blend 2.5, so there will be no future Expression Blend 2.5 releases.

In Expression Blend 2, when you choose to edit a code file or insert an event handler for an event, by default, Visual Studio will be launched. If you have multiple versions of Visual Studio (VS) installed, though, you may find that a different version of VS than the one you intended to open will get launched. The most common case is where you have both VS 2005 and VS 2008 installed, but VS 2005 gets launched by Blend instead of VS 2008.

The fix for this involves editing your registry. From the Run prompt (WinKey + R), type regedit and press enter:

With your Registry Editor now running, navigate to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.DTE.9.0\CLSID. Copy the Value Data from this key:

With that value copied, go to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.DTE\CLSID, and overwrite its existing value with the data you just copied a few seconds.

Since we released Deep Zoom Composer a while ago at MIX, we relied extensively on all of you to both create cool things using it as well as suggest new features for subsequent releases. Another major area that many of you have helped us with is documenting some of the cool things that you all have done with Deep Zoom.

In this post, I’ll try to point out some of the cool documentation to help you out in your deep zoom quest: